After four albums — one of which is a collaboration with David Byrne — that have conventional titles, Annie Clark’s fifth simply is St. Vincent. This suggests that only now is St. Vincent getting started as though this is her first record.

In truth, she feels this record is most like her, what she wanted to express. While she says she is proud of all her albums and would never dismiss them, St. Vincent is the record she’d intended.

“I wanted to make a party record you could play at a funeral,” she explains. “It had to have a groove and a heart.”

So, it is a celebration with a solemn undercurrent. It allows the listener to delight in the upbeat tone of the music while being disturbed by its imagery. It glimpses St. Vincent’s humour and intelligence, and, in a way, looks ahead. St. Vincent is by no means finished.

“Everything is growth,” St. Vincent notes. “You never reach a place where you go, ‘Whew! I can let that go. I’m here.’ You never arrive.
“It’s not about being perfect, it’s about getting closer.”

So St. Vincent is on the path that will get her closer to St. Vincent.

About a decade ago, while attending the prestigious Berklee College Of Music, she remarked that in order to make music you had to soak up as much learning as available and then forget it. Music becomes a tool, part of the vocabulary of a musician, a starting point.

“They were talking about the doing things the right way as opposed to the wrong way,” she casts her memory back. “There was too much baggage attached.”

She learned there is no right or wrong way and found inspiration elsewhere.

Two years ago, St. Vincent made an album, Love This Giant, with former Talking Head, David Byrne and toured together.

“The reason he is so vital and exuberant even 40 years into a career is that he still wants to learn,” she says of Byrne admiringly.

“There’s an aspect of being a musician that keeps you young,” St. Vincent concludes. “You can be optimistic eternally. There is this mechanism that keeps you optimistic, that what you do tomorrow will be better than what you did today.”

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